March 25, 2022
A 21-year-old Iranian-American woman in Nevada stabbed her date, whom she had met online, in retaliation for the 2020 assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleymani in an American drone strike, police said.
Nika Nikoubin has been charged with attempted murder and battery with a deadly weapon.
Nikoubin and the man met online on a dating website, Henderson police wrote in an arrest report. Henderson is a suburb of Las Vegas. The pair agreed to meet at the Sunset Station Hotel March 5, renting a room together.
The pair began having sex and Nikoubin put a blindfold on the man, police said. Nikoubin then turned off the lights, and several minutes later, the man “felt a pain on the side of his neck,” KLAS-TV of Las Vegas reported.
Nikoubin reportedly stabbed the man in the neck “for revenge against US troops for the killing of Qasem Soleymani in 2020,” police wrote in a report. There was no indication why Nikoubin chose that man over others. There was also no indication of whether the man stabbed had any link to the assassination.
US forces killed Soleymani, the commander of Iran’s Qods Force, in a drone strike in January 2020.
After the stabbing, the man, who was not named, pushed Nikoubin off of him and ran out of the room to call 911, police said. He was not injured seriously enough to require hospitalization,
Nikoubin also ran out of the room, telling a hotel employee that she had just stabbed a man, police said.
When talking to police, Nikoubin told an investigator “she wanted revenge,” police said. She said she had listened to a song called “Grave Digger,” which “gave her the motivation … to carry out her revenge.”
Nikoubin told detectives she only wanted to hurt the man and did not intend to kill him when she stabbed him twice, according to the arrest report.
She was being held on bail of $60,000. She is due to appear in Court April 15 after undergoing a competency evaluation to determine if she has a mental health problem that prevents her from understanding the charges against her.
It isn’t yet known if Nikoubin was born in Iran or the US. Her social media profiles say she was reared in Lubbock, Texas, where she was a member of her high school cheerleading squad and ran for student body president. At some point, she moved to Nevada and worked as a front desk associate at a local bar. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and was president of the university’s debate team. A post by UCLA’s debate team in 2020 said Nikoubin was a third-year student then.